Now they roam the streets as a paramilitary force built around hastily armored trucks that have been fitted with captured machine guns set on crude turrets and mounts.
The transformation, evident in an offensive late last month that chased many of Colonel Qaddafi’s forces from Misurata’s center to its outskirts, is in part the result of a hidden side of this lopsided ground war: a clandestine network of rebel workshops, where these makeshift weapons have been designed, assembled and pushed out.
The workshops are officially a rebel secret. But for three days journalists for The New York Times were granted access to two of them, on the condition that their exact locations not be disclosed and that no photographs be taken of their entrances.
On display inside were both the logistics and the mentality of the seesaw fight for Libya’s third-largest city. In Misurata, an almost spontaneously assembled civilian force has managed, alone along Libya’s central and western stretch of Mediterranean coast, to withstand a sustained conventional attack from an army with all the arms and munitions an oil state can buy.
In these places — the fledgling war industry for a force that regards itself as a democratic insurgency — weapons manufactured in cold war-era factories to be operated remotely on aircraft and tanks have been modified for manual use.
Four-door civilian pickup trucks have been converted to sinister-appearing armored vehicles. And conventional munitions designed for one thing — land mines and tank shells, for which the rebels have little use — have been converted to other types of lethal arms.
The rebels remain ill equipped and materially outmatched. Some of their production is of questionable value. But they have acquired a collective sense that, to drive back the Qaddafi troops, any contribution matters.
And there is no question that their fighting power has grown. For the beleaguered residents, just as war can be fought with rifles, it can be waged with hammers, grinders and lathes.
“If we had enough weapons, I would not be here,” said Ahmed Shirksy, a welder fitting an armored plate to a pickup truck’s bed on Monday morning, as shells fell in neighborhoods nearby. “I would be fighting at the front lines, with two of my sons.”
Around Mr. Shirksy were the assignments of the day — four civilian pickup trucks in various states of conversion to fighting machines. There was also a pair of long sawhorses serving as a workstation for modifying heavy machine guns.
Here Omar el-Saghier, 30, puzzled over a .50-caliber machine gun that had no manual trigger. Asked what kind of machine gun he was working on (it appeared to be an FN Herstal M3M, designed for aircraft), he allowed himself a smile and answered in English.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said.
But Mr. Saghier had figured out how to make it work. And by using a set of machinist’s tools and scraps and sheets of steel, he was midway through designing and creating a custom trigger, so that this weapon might be fired by a man standing at a turret in the back of a pickup truck.
Another team beside him was making a rotating pedestal mount for the weapon. A third team was fitting a set of metal plates to the truck that would, before the day’s end, become part of the rebels’ fleet.
These armor-clad gun trucks, typically painted black and often with their taillights and turn signals removed or painted over so they are more difficult to spot, are the signature weapon of the Misurata rebels.
The exact quantity that have been made is not known, said Bashir el-Zargani, who supervises the workshops.
“We have been too busy to count them,” he said.
But judging from the number seen racing through the city each day, and at Misurata’s many fronts, the total easily exceeds 100, and might be more than twice that.
The pickup trucks are only one of the workshops’ products.
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